Jollyblogger on the Will of God...

David Wayne, over at Jollyblogger, has piggybacked off of my post It is the will of..., with his own Is Finding the Will of God Biblical? It's an excellent read on this topic. He also references an article in Antithesis by Bruce Waltke, author of Finding the Will of God: a pagan notion?. David states,

...I want to suggest that our modern obsession with finding the will of God is evidence of evangelicalism narcissism... I owe my thoughts on the first matter to Henry Krabbendam of Covenant College... ...the idea of finding God's will for your life as an individual is a fairly recent development in the history of Christendom. For most of the church's history God's will was spoken of in terms of His decretive will and His revealed will, particularly in the Ten Commandments. In other words, a discussion of God's will would usually have something to do with the doctrine of God's decrees (or predestination), or with obedience to the Ten Commandments. This was in a day when theology and the church were far more God centered than we are today. This "God-centeredness" has been replaced with a "man-centered" worldview where we are far more focused on ourselves than God. Thus we are far more concerned with whom we are to marry, where to work, and which pair of socks to put on today than we are with obedience to the Ten Commandments, or submission to God's decree.

On Antithesis, Waltke says,

Far too many Christians rely on faulty logic to divine the will of God. Their thinking goes like this:

God has a plan, and therefore He intends that I find it.

That is a non sequitur, a conclusion that cannot logically follow the premise.

Simply because God has a plan does not mean that He necessarily has any intention of sharing it with you.

As a matter of fact the message of Job is in part that the Lord in His sovereignty may allow terrible things to happen to you, and you may never know why.